7.The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells. 随着一阵响彻云霄的钟声的敲响，一群燕子惊得展翅高翔，白塔映日的海滨城市奥米勒斯迎来了她的夏庆节。

Pub Talk and the King’s English Paraphrase1.And conversation is an activity which is found only amonghuman beings.2.Conversation is not for persuading others to accept ouridea or point of view. In a conversationw e should not try to establish the force of an idea or argument.3.Infact a person who really enjoys and is skilled atconversation will not to win or force others to accept his point of view.4.People who meet each other for a drink in the bar of a pubare not intimate friends for they are not deeply absorbed or engrossed in each other’s lives.5.The conversation could go on without anybody knowingwho was right or wrong.6.These animals are called cattle when we sit down at thetable to eat, we call their meat beef.7.The new ruling class by using French instead of Englishmade it difficult for the English to accept or absorb the culture of the rulers.8.The English language received proper recognition and wasused by the king once more.9.The phrase, the King’s English, has always been useddisparagingly and jokingly by the lower classes. The working people very often make fun of the proper and formal language of the educated people.10.There still exists in the working people, as in the earlySaxon peasants, a spirit of opposition to the cultural authority of the ruling class.11.There is always a great danger that we might forget thatwords are only symbols and take them for things they are supposed to representMarrakechIII Paraphrase1.The burying-ground is nothing more than a huge piece ofwasteland full of mounds of earth looking like a deserted and abandoned piece of land on which a building was going to be put up.2.All the imperialists build up their empires by treating thepeople int he colonies like animals (by not treating the people in the colonies as human beings).3.They are born. Then for a few years they work, toil andstarve. Finally they die and are buried in graves without a name, and nobody notices that they are dead.4.Sitting with his legs crossed and using a veryold-fashioned lathe, a carpenter quickly gives a round shape to the chair-legs he is making.5.Immediately fromt heir dark hole-like cells everywhere agreat number of Jews rushed out wildly excited, all loudly demanding a cigarette.6.Every one of these poor Jews looks on the cigarette as apiece of luxury which they could not possibly afford.7.However, a white-skinned European is always quitenoticeable. / However, people always notice any one with a white skin.8.If you take a look at the natural scenery in a tropical region,you see everything but the human beings.9.No one would think of organizing cheap trips for thetourists to visit the poor slum areas (for these trips would not be interesting).10.Life is very hard for ninety percent of the people. They canproduce a little food on the poor soil only with hard backbreaking toil.11.She took it for granted that as an old woman she was thelowest in the community, that she was only fit for doing heavy work like an animal.12.People with brown skins are almost inisible.13.The Senegaleses soldiers were wearing second-handready-made khaki uniforms which hid their beautiful, well-built bodies.14.How much longer before they turn their guns around andattack the colonialist rulers?15.Every white man hhad this thought hidden somewhere inhis mind.Inaugural AddressParaphrase1.Our ancestors foutght a revolutionary war to maintain thatall men were created equal and God had given them certain unalienable rights which no state or ruler could take away from them. But today this issue has not yet been settled in many countries around the world.2.We promise to do this much and we promise to do more.3.United and working together we can accomplish a lot ofthings in a great number of joint bold undertakings.4.The United Nations is our last and best hope of survival inan age where the tools to wage war have far surpassed and exceeded the tols to keep peace.5.We pledge to help the United Nations enlarge the areas inwhich its authority and mandate could continue to be in effect or in force.6.Before the terrible forces of destruction, which atomicbombs can now release, wipe out mankind, which may be planned or brought about by an accident.7.Yet both groups of nations are trying to change as quicklyas possible this uncertain balance of terrible military power which restrains each group from launching mankind’s final war.8.Let us start over again. We must bear in mind that beingpolite does not mean one is weak.9.Let both sides try to use science to produce good andbeneficial things for man instead of employing it to bring frightful destruction.10.Americans of every generation have been called upon toprove their loyalty to their country (by fighting and dying for their country’s cause).11.We will lead the country we love, knowing our sure rewardwill be a good conscience, and history will finally judge whether we have done our task well or not.The Sad Young MenIII Paraphrase1.At the very mention of this poset-war period, middle-agedpeople begin to think about it longingly and young people become curious and start asking all kinds of questions. 2.In any case, America could not avoid casting aside itsmiddle-class respectability and affected refinement.3.The war only helped to speed up the breakdown of theVictorian social structure.4.In America the young people did not seriously thake up theresponsibility of changing the traditional customs of society; instead they lived unconventional lives and, by drinking and behaving indecently in many ways, they broke the moral code of the community.5.The young people found greater pleasure in their drinkingbecause Prohibition, by making drinking unlawful, addeda sense of adventure.6.As a result, the young men began to join the armies offoreign countries to fight in the war.7.The young people wanted to take part in the gloriousadventure before the war ended.8.These young people could no longer adapt to lives in theirhome towns or their families.9.The returning veteran soldiers also had to face the stupedcynicism of the victorious allies in Versailles who acted as cynically as Napoleon did. They had to face Progibition which the lawmakers hypocritically assumed would be good for the people.10.(Under all this force and pressure) something in the youthof America, who were already very tense, had to break down.11.It was only natural that hopeful young writers, whoseminds and writings were filled with violent anger against war, Babbitry, and Puritanical gentility, should come in great numbers to live in Greenwich Village, the traditional artistic centre.12.Each town was proud that it had a group of wild, recklesspeople, who lived unconventional lives.The One Who Walk Away from Omelas Paraphrase1.The loud ringing of the bells, which sent the frightenedswallows flying high, marks the beginning of the Festival of Summer in Omelas.2.The shouting of the children could be heard clearly abovethe music and singing like the calls of the swallows flying by overheard.3.The riders were putting the horses through some exercisesbecause the horses were eager to start and stubbornly resisting the control of the riders.4.After reading the above description the reader is likely toassume certain things.5.An artist betrays his trust and faith when he does notadmit that evil is nothing fresh not novel and pain is very dull and uninteresting.6.They were fully developed and intelligent grown-up peoplefull of intense feelings but they were not miserable people.7.Perhaps it would be best if you readers picture Omelas toyourselves as your imagination tells you what to do, as I believe your imagination will be able to deal with the task well.8.The faint but compelling sweet scent of the drug drooz mayfill the streets of the city.9.perhaps the child was born mentally retarded or perhaps ithas become feeble-minded due to fear, poor nourishment and neglect.10.the habits of the child are so crude and uncultured that itwon’t be able to appreciate kind and tender treatment. 11.they shed tears when they first saw how terribly unjust thechild was treated but these tears dry up when they realize how just and fair reality is though it is terrible, and they accept it.12.the existence of the child and their knowledge of itsexistence is the reason that makes their buildings grand and impressive, their music moving and their science intellectually deep.The Future of the EnglishParaphrase1.The English people may hotly argue and abuse and quarrelwith each other on the surface, but there still exists a lot of natural sympathetic feeling for each other in their hearts.2.What the wealthy employers would really like to do is towhip all the workers, whom they consider to be lazy and troublesome.3.there are not many snarling shop stewards in theworkshop, nor are there many cruel wealthy employers on the board of directors.4.The contemporary world demands that everything be bigor done on a big scale and the English do not like or trust bigness.5.At least on the surface, when Englishness is put againstthe power and success of Admass, Englishness seems to put up a rather poor weak performance.6.Englishness is not against change, but it believes thatchanging just for the sake of changing and for no other useful purpose is very wrong and harmful.7.To regard cars and motorways as more important thanhouses seems to Englishness a public stupidity.8.I must further say that while Englishness can go onfighting, there is a great possibility of Admass winning. 9.Englishness draws its strength from a reservoir of strongmoral and ethical principles, and soon it may be asking for strength which this reservoir of principles cannot supply.10.These people probably believe, as I do, that the so-called“Good Life” promised by Admass is false and dishonest in all respects.11.He will not even find satisfaction in this untidy anddisordered life where he manages to live as a parasite by sponging on people.12.These people regard the House of Common as a place faraway from their daily life where some people are always quarreling and arguing over some small matter.13.If a dictator comes to power, these people then will soonlearn in the worst way that they were very wrong to ignore politics for they can now suddenly and for no reason be arrested and thrown into prison.Disappearing Through the Skylight Paraphrase1.Science is engaged in the task of making its basic conceptsunderstood and accepted by scientists all over the world.Science exhibits the universalizing tendency.2.The car model, called Fiesta, seems to have disappearedcompletely.3.The idea of a world car is similar to the International Stylein architecture.4.Things that are happening in automaking are similar tothose happening in architecture.5.The modern man no longer has very distinct individualtraits shaped by a special environment and culture.6.The disadvantage of being a cosmopolitan is that he loses ahome in the old sense of the word.7.The advantage of being a cosmopolitan is that he begins tothink that the old kind of home probably restricts his development and activities8.The compelling force of technology to universalize cannotbe resisted.9.When every artist thought it was their duty to showcontempt for and objection to the Eiffel Tower which they considered an architectural structure that dishonored Paris, the center and arbiter of art and culture.10.In the past people firmly believed that the things they sawaround them were real solid substances, but this has now been thrown into doubt by science.11.This disappearance of history frees the mind fromtraditional concepts. It is like what Madame Buffet-Picabia says: a flexible and pliable quality that was beyond human powers and absolutely new.12.That, perhaps, shows how far logically modern aestheticcan go.。

THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELASby Ursula K. Le GuinWith a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance.Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay.The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much anymore. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children—though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people.Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, andwhat is destructive. In the middle category, however—that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.—they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that; it doesn’t matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers’ Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beauti ful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas—at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were not drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendo r of the world’s summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don’t think many of them need to take drooz.Most of the procession have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old women, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men where her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune.He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses’ necks and soothe them, whispering, “Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope....” They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In onecorner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes—the child has no understanding of time or interval—sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there.One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help a t night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancyof their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.。